Science Quote by Marvin Harris

Harris is taking a scalpel to the industrial world’s favorite superstition: that “more” is automatically “better.” The sentence lumbers on purpose, mirroring the very bloat it diagnoses. That repetition of “too much” isn’t rhetorical padding; it’s the point. In affluent societies, scarcity stops being the primary threat and excess becomes its own hazard, not as a moral sermon but as a systems problem. Harris, a materialist anthropologist, is less interested in individual willpower than in the machinery that makes overconsumption feel normal, even rational.

The phrase “a significant part of the industrial world” quietly widens the target beyond any one country while still indicting a shared model of production: high throughput, high marketing pressure, high waste tolerance. His careful qualifier “could become a danger” reads like scientific restraint, but it also signals a political reality: calling abundance dangerous is culturally heretical in economies built on growth. He’s not saying comfort is evil; he’s saying the wrong kinds of abundance - calorie-dense food, disposable goods, energy use, chemical exposure, information overload - scale faster than our bodies, institutions, and ecosystems can metabolize.

The subtext is anthropological: humans adapt brilliantly to shortage, then get blindsided by the unintended consequences of plenty. Harris is warning that “not good for us” isn’t just about health. It’s about a feedback loop where industries profit from over-supplying, consumers are trained to over-demand, and the costs (disease, pollution, inequality, climate risk) are exported to the future.